State, Commerce Departments Breached by Hackers

(TNS) — Hackers breached Microsoft Outlook email accounts linked to government agencies in the United States, including State and Commerce departments, and others in Western Europe, according to government officials and Microsoft Corp., which described the attackers as being based in China.

Last month, the U.S. State Department identified anomalous activity and alerted Microsoft to the attack, according to a spokesperson. A subsequent investigation by the company determined that the hackers accessed and exfiltrated unclassified Exchange Online Outlook data from a small number of accounts,” according to a statement from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA.

The U.S. Commerce Department was also breached and took immediate action after being notified by Microsoft, a spokesperson said. The department is monitoring its systems and would respond promptly if additional activity is detected, the spokesperson added.

It wasn’t known which other U.S. agencies were affected by the breach, but a senior official said the number was in the single digits.

In an interview with ABC News on Wednesday morning, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said, “We detected it fairly rapidly, and we were able to prevent further breaches. The matter is still being investigated.”

In a blog post published Tuesday night, Microsoft described the group behind the attack as China-based and named it Storm-0558. The hackers were able to remain undetected for a month after gaining access to email data from around 25 organizations in mid-May.

“We assess this adversary is focused on espionage, such as gaining access to email systems for intelligence collection,” Charlie Bell, an executive vice president at Microsoft, wrote in another post.

It also wasn’t clear which European governments were affected. Italian cybersecurity officials said they were in contact with Microsoft “in order to identify potential Italian subjects involved in the latest attacks.”

Asked about the findings, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin, at a regular briefing Wednesday, accused the U.S. of being the world’s…